Banning Music in Somalia

After two decades of internal warfare, Somalia has demonstrated a consistent ability to create disheartening news. Long acknowledged as the world’s ultimate failed state, Somalia has more recently—justifiably—become known as the headquarters of maritime piracy. Now its homegrown Islamist insurgents, the Shabbab (the Youth), who have espoused an allegiance to Al Qaeda’s global jihad, are doing their utmost to outdo their counterparts in other countries in applying an unflinchingly severe version of Islam.

Last week, the group, which controls most of southern Somalia and large sections of the capital, Mogadishu, announced a ban on music—and even, reportedly, on school bells—in its territory, as “un-Islamic.” The BBC and other Western broadcasters are also forbidden. The Shabbab had previously prohibited international aid organizations from distributing food or providing medical treatment to the hundreds of thousands of needy, war-displaced Somali civilians living under its armed custody.

Yesterday, Human Rights Watch issued its latest report on Somalia. It paints a devastating, bleak, and upsetting portrait of life for Somali civilians under the Shabbab. Entitled “Harsh War, Harsh Peace,” the report details human-rights violations by all of Somalia’s armed parties: the Shabbab; the weak central government headed by the Western-backed, Islamist-firebrand-turned-moderate President, Sheikh Ahmed Sheikh Sharif; and even the several thousand Ugandan and Burundian troops of AMISOM, the U.N.-backed African Union peacekeeping force. AMISOM provides security to Sharif’s government and is all that keeps it from falling to the Shabbab.

For now, a ceaseless war of positions goes on in Somalia, punctuated by the odd Shabbab suicide bombing or renewed bout of fighting. In Mogadishu, the Shabbab’s front lines are just a few miles from Villa Somalia, the presidential compound; you can see them from there with the naked eye. Last August, I travelled to Mogadishu to report a story on Sheikh Sharif (subscription required) and stayed at Villa Somalia. One day during my stay, a heated round of back-and-forth shelling took place. Neither side gained any ground, but a dozen or so civilians were killed in the shelling.

It is because of the carelessness of such barrages that the government and AMISOM come in for criticism from Human Rights Watch. Nevertheless, the report makes it clear that the Shabbab are by far the worst human-rights transgressors in Somalia. In the south of the country, as the Human Rights Watch report details, Somalis live in greater peace from rival warlords or the depredations of marauding militias, but in fear of the Shabbab. As one resident of a southern town explained: “We just stay quiet. If they tell us to follow a certain path, we follow it.”

Human Rights Watch conducted over seventy interviews with civilians living under the Shabbab. They describe the insurgents as having imposed a cruel tyranny in their territory, behaving especially harshly toward women. The litany of cruelties is depressingly familiar: amputations and floggings are said to be routine; women are beaten for leaving their homes without wearing their abaya robes in the properly decreed manner. There are stonings and beheadings and firing squads and assassinations, to which not just women but men and boys are subjected for various infractions.

I recall a similar pattern of steadily growing obsessiveness about upholding and safeguarding “Islamic purity” during the Taliban rule in Afghanistan, before the American invasion in 2001. The Taliban had banned music early, but later on, perhaps because they had free rein, and perhaps because they could, they began adding more and more items to their “banned” list. As Amy Waldman reported in the Times in 2001, this came to encompass

Eventually, even kite-flying was banned on the grounds that it was not Islamic, and because in the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, as the Taliban came to call their country, it was considered right that children should be praying, not playing. The Taliban’s destruction of the Buddhas of Bamiyan, along with other “idolatrous” ancient treasures in the national museum of Kabul, didn’t come about until March, 2001, late in their tenure. That act, in the face of appeals from cultural institutions and governments around the world, seemed as much one of defiance as anything else. Perhaps the Shabbab, now on their own banning frenzy, are feeling threatened, too.

Last month, I went to see Sharif in Birmingham, England, during a week-long visit to Great Britain. He had come to meet the members of the Somali emigre community in a convention centre in a beat-up part of town. As hundreds of Somalis filed in, I was shown through a tight police security cordon and into an upstairs waiting room. Sharif was sitting in a small meeting room with an aide, eating lunch. During the previous few days there had been an upsurge in fighting in Mogadishu; the Shabbab had been attacking government positions in an effort to probe them, seemingly, and to advance; there had been dozens of deaths. I suggested that the Shabbab looked prepared to put up a fight. Sharif shrugged, and said, “It is their counteroffensive before our offensive.” The offensive, he assured me, was coming soon.

Jon Lee Anderson, a staff writer, began contributing to The New Yorker in 1998.